The following abbreviations and notations are herewith defined, at least some of which are referred to within the following description of the prior art and the present invention.    3GPP Third Generation Partnership Project    BSC Base Station Controller    BTS Base Transceiver Station    DCH Dedicated Channel    E-UTRAN Evolved-UMTS Radio Access Network    GERAN GSM EDGE Radio Access Network    GGSN Gateway GPRS Support Node    GPRS General Packet Radio Service    HS High Speed    LTE Long-Term Evolution    MME Mobile Management Entity    MOS Mean Opinion Score    OAM Operation and Maintenance    QoS Quality of Service    RNC Radio Network Controller    RSCP Received Signal Code Power    SGSN Serving GPRS Support Node    S-GW Serving Gateway    SQM Service Quality Metric    UTRAN UMTS Radio Access Network
Quality of Service (QoS) has enormous importance in a communication network since a customers' willingness to use the offered services of the communications network drastically decreases whenever the quality of the service is not acceptable. In fact, it is commonly envisaged that in the very near future (even today) the network operators will mainly be differentiated among customers based on the level of QoS they can reliably offer to their customers assuming that the prices of network services converge.
In today's mobile data network, for instance, providing a good QoS is a continuous challenge since the number of services, the number of customers, and thus the number of individual service usage transactions is rapidly increasing while the capacity of the communications network that enables this demand for the services cannot grow forever due to certain physical limitations. This means that there will always be shorter periods, longer periods, or situations when the number of available network resources will be limited when compared to the actual demand set that is to be served simultaneously.
Modern network operators try to continuously monitor the performance of their communications network with respect to the individual services they offer by using service-centric management systems. These service-centric management systems aim to detect changes (drops) in service quality and then the operator tries to find the reason and solution for the QoS degradation to please its customers and to avoid such further drops in service quality.
Today, each service has a QoS measured through specific service quality metrics (SQM). These service quality metrics are typically well-known and widely accepted, and are even standardized. For instance, in the case of a mobile data network with mobile internet for mobile broadband) being the service in question, then the typical SQM to be monitored and maintained on an acceptable level is the end-to-end user throughput. Furthermore, in the case of a video streaming service in the same environment, then the mean opinion score (MOS) of the video is a good SQM and this has even been standardized in 3GPP.
Communication networks are very complex so there are plenty of individual effects that can deteriorate the QoS and thus yield a lower value of the corresponding SQM. These individual and often (partly) independent effects are referred to herein as factors. In a mobile data network, typical factors are for instance the current network load, i.e., the number of parallel active users in the same cell where the service is used, the type of user equipment participating in the service usage transaction, or the current physical radio conditions, which are measured through several factors such as for instance channel quality information, signal strength, and the congestion situation on the transport links. There are also factors and effects which can come from outside of the network operator's domain, but their elect such as a loss on the interne side outside of the operator's core network can be detected as well.
Almost every network operator today has a certain part of its communication system devoted to performance aspects. This typically involves the use of a performance monitoring module that records individual pieces of information related to network performance. Then, another module (or series of modules) is (are) responsible for using the collected information and providing a means to assess, QoS issues in a tailored way (or tailored ways).
The first and probably one of the most important issues for the performance monitoring module is to collect the correct performance data from inside the communication network that can later be used to assess the QoS in a reliable way. This means that the correct granularity, the detail level, all relevant data related to factors that can affect the final QoS should be carefully selected and included in the data collection. In addition, since there are several individual data sources throughout a communications network (many types of nodes exist where the traffic passes through) that provide meaningful information related to service performance, these individual data pieces in a good performance management system should be correlated to each other, in order to put the pieces together to see all the aspects affecting the performance of the communications network. However, this leads to a second issue for the performance management system since putting the pieces together is not trivial and is often not followed this means that the individual data sources are commonly analyzed separately.
The third issue for a good performance monitoring system it that it should in an ideal case work on-line, continuously, and automatically to execute and evaluate the data pieces. However, many performance monitoring systems work periodically on a demand type of execution and evaluation of the data pieces by, for instance, checking the network status weekly or monthly following standardized reporting procedures and then aggregating high level statistical information coming from communication network logging. Hence, it can be seen that there are several issues associated with the current network monitoring and QoS management techniques typically used today by the network operators. These issues and other issues are satisfied by the present invention.